Part One It is siesta time in the town. Today, the silence of slumber is more complete even than usual, since the only citizen permitted to continue work after the midday curfew bell has for once elected to waive the privilege. His sleep seems all the deeper for its rarity, but no one could say […]

MONDAY Carol is so sad. She hasn’t gone downstairs to make the pasta bake and she hasn’t put her trousers on and she hasn’t replied to her boyfriend and she hasn’t called her brother and she hasn’t made a doctor’s appointment and she hasn’t fixed her skin and she hasn’t started her tax return and […]

Tara sat in front of the washing machine. She looked at the way the clothes moved in circles, sometimes showing a little bit of colour but mostly just black; she listened to the machine, a constant hum that echoed in the room where she waited. She thought about the way the clothes resembled a hurricane […]

‘You don’t look like your voice,’ he said. This was by the photocopier, next to Learning and Development. Eleanor looked up from her phone. ‘Sorry?’ she said. ‘You don’t look like your voice.’ He looked at her briefly, an awkward smile on his face, and returned his attention to the copier. ‘And what,’ asked Eleanor, […]

The mermaid was gone from the icehouse and the Dowager declared the tenants had all been lying, or else their minds had been touched by the cold and too much whisky. Being their only gentle-born witness, I was summoned to the Bighouse to defend their tale. My father was angry; he couldn’t say so openly, […]

Nick Cooke was born in London in 1961 and attended Christ’s College Cambridge, where he graduated in English Literature. He spent six years in Turin, Italy, as a teacher and translator, before returning to London in 1989, since when he has worked in Further Education as an EFL/ESOL curriculum leader and teacher, and a CELTA […]

Anna Appleby was born in Newcastle upon Tyne in 1993 and tragically lost her Geordie accent in a collision with the South. She floated around looking for a voice but eventually gave up and wrote things down instead. Anna now lives in Greater Manchester where she composes music and shops at Lidl in between writing […]

Mulix is a Latin American writer who is studying theatre, creative writing and performance arts. She wants to explore alternative forms of narrative as well as raw human behaviour. The origins of her writing are in competitiveness. When she was in primary school her older brother wrote an amazing story about the end of the […]

Stephen Hargadon’s writing has appeared in various places, online and in print, including Black Static, Tales from the Shadow Booth, Crimewave, Confingo, Structo, Popshot, Litro, Thresholds and LossLit. He was a runner-up in the 2018 Dinesh Allirajah prize for short fiction (his story was published in the Comma Press competition anthology, Café Stories). In 2017 […]

Miriam Hastings is a novelist and short story writer. She has published fiction, poetry, literary reviews and articles, and essays on mental health. In her work, Miriam is most concerned with portraying the experience of the outsider in society; giving a voice to the powerless and oppressed. She is disabled and can only write using […]